Birch bark was a key building material for Native Americans and the fur trappers who traveled across Canada and the northern United States. It was used for baskets as well as canoes. If you've got time, you can learn how to weave your own creations with birch bark at Voyageuers National Park.
This week’s quiz is all about glaciers and glaciation in the national parks. Answers are at the end. If we catch you peeking, we’ll make you write on the whiteboard 100 times: “Eskers, depositional landforms composed of stratified gravel and sand, characteristically exist as long, narrow, sinuous ridges with steep sides.”
With national park redesignation back in the news, this seems like a good time to remind Traveler readers just how nonsensical National Park System unit nomenclature has become. Why can’t Congress and the National Park Service put their heads together and come up with a designation system that actually makes sense?
Few photographic presentations can capture the feel and magnitude of our scenic national parks like the panoramic print. When you walk past a wide photo, you can feel yourself getting drawn in. Here's how to make those photos happen.
While no decisions have been announced by the Interior Department as to how stimulus funds can best be used in the National Park System, there are plenty of suggestions being offered. One is to turn Omculgee National Monument into a national park.
Some units of the National Park System offer premier sites for enjoying the night sky, due to their location far from cities and the accompanying light pollution. One park which doesn't have the advantage of dark skies has something else—the only planetarium in the National Park System.
Sunflowers, violets, trillium and other wildflowers are just around the proverbial corner in the Appalachian Mountains. You can spot these and dozens of others in Shenandoah and Great Smoky Mountains national parks, as well as along the Blue Ridge Parkway.
The problem with the "10 best" of anything books, articles or wish-lists is that you're bound to fail from the get-go. That's one reason why the Traveler has yet to release its Top 10 National Parks list. As soon as you begin listing the "ten best" of anything, you're trolling for a debate.